Vietnam War literature is uniquely good. Embedded journalists, articulate veterans, and the rare position of a major war that the United States lost combined to produce a body of writing that no other twentieth-century conflict has matched. The problem is volume: there are hundreds of titles, and they do not all do the same job.
The shortest useful answer for a reader new to the territory: read these three first, in this order.
1. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Linked short stories from Alpha Company in 1968. Hovers permanently between fiction and memoir. The title story alone, an inventory of the literal objects each soldier carried into the field, is closer to the texture of infantry combat than anything else in English prose.
2. A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan. Sixteen years of research compressed into a single Pulitzer-winning volume, built around Lt Col John Paul Vann. The institutional and political backbone you need before any of the other histories make sense.
3. The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh. The Vietnam war seen from the other side, written by a North Vietnamese veteran. Reading this immediately after Sheehan is the moment the whole war stops being an American story and becomes a Vietnamese one.
After these three you can branch into Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn for the Marine combat experience, Michael Herr's Dispatches for the press-side counterculture, or David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest for the policy disaster. But the three above are the foundation.
Skriuwer has the full ranked list here, sorted into combat memoir, Vietnamese perspective, journalism and policy, and the specific-battle books.
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